Starting a Radio Show and then some…

Hello Asia! Is now in its 4th year of being on the air… For us, getting on air was easy. We were lucky to go a University where the radio station was a free form (community) station. This allows for DJs to format and produce their own 1-2 hour shows, play whatever genre they were interested in as long as it follows the rules of the station, most importantly FCC guidelines if it’s an FM station.

This isn’t actually the norm. Most radio stations are pre-formatted and stick to one genre of music and on-air personalities are usually used to fill in time with weather, traffic and such… kind of like display items. I’m not bitter at all…

If you’re interested in having a radio show or even running your own K-Pop station, there are a couple ways to go.

Check with your school and/or community and see if they are running a free-form station like our The U: UMSLRadio or KDHX which is our two community radio stations. Most of the time they will let you play your own music as long as it’s clean and you follow FCC guidelines.

Now disclaimer, The U: UMSLRadio is a special case, we are actually an Online Only radio station, we actually do not have to follow FCC guidelines so our rules are lax about how many artists we can play in an hour and requires us to have special permission from our program director prior. So please check with the stations rules regarding this. Most will not allow for a show where one group is being played.

Now let’s talk about the beauty of the internet…

It’s a wonderful thing really, There are a few ways to start your own radio station online. There are software and programs that will allow for you to start your very own online station. It will have automation where music can be played when no one is live also meaning it’s not require for you to be on and live on air for 24/7 but allows for live broadcasting when needed. However, as I said before, please be aware that many will still have rules regarding how many times an artist can be played

I have talked a lot about radio verses podcasting and there is a reason… a lot has to do with royalties, and reporting to the charts.

Because the music is license with must pay royalties because artist/groups/producers/writers/composers need to get paid… nuff said

This is something difficult to do with podcast because they haven’t figured out how to because it’s something listeners can keep, while radio is supposed to play once and maybe an encore and be done with so radio is often under a blanket license.

So that’s a little bit of a run down to get you all thinking about it. I’ll try to post about equipment that we use or you can use if you decided to create your own radio/podcast and such in the next blog.